Legend:

These notes were written by Sue Gardner based on a session at the winter dev meeting about Tor community health. This was a table conversation attended by about 15 people: we didn't create any work product (e.g., stickies), and I didn't take many notes. The notes here are my impressions from the discussion, reconstructed from notes I took during the workshop as well as from memory.

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These notes were written by Sue Gardner based on a session at the winter dev meeting about Tor community health. The session mostly focused on the mental and physical health problems of the individuals present resulting from their work and the environment. This was a table conversation attended by about 15 people: we didn't create any work product (e.g., stickies), and I didn't take many notes. The notes here are my impressions from the discussion, reconstructed from notes I took during the workshop as well as from memory.

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What surfaced in the conversation was the degree to which Tor-involved people feel stressed, alienated, anxious or isolated in doing their Tor-related work. Some of this, I believe, is not Tor-specific, i.e., it's fairly normal for developers to report high rates of depression, isolation, ADD, and anxiety, and developers often have bad self-care/coping habits such as bad sleep hygiene or self-medication with coffee or alcohol. That's probably as true for Tor as it is for other technical cultures. But what came out in our discussions is that Tor-involved people seem to experience significant additional stress, due to their specific context.